The InfoVis Contest is a participation category of
the InfoVis 2004 Symposium. It
continues in the footsteps of the InfoVis 2003 Contest. The
goal of the contest is to promote the development of benchmarks for information
visualization and establish a forum to advance evaluation methods.

In 2004 the IEEE Information Visualization conference will be celebrating its tenth anniversary, a perfect time to
select the history of the field as the theme. The contest encourages
visualizations that support the discovery and identification of major research
topics, relationships between members of the community, trends over time etc.

All categories of
competitors (academic and commercial) may participate. We especially encourage
student and class submissions.We
suggest that students planning to submit to the contest apply to be student
volunteers immediately (the positions are filled quickly and you can always
cancel if needed).

We thank students from the University of Paris South (Caroline Appert) and the University of Massachusetts Lowell (Urska Cvek,
Alexander Gee, Howie Goodell, Vivek Gupta, Christine
Lawrence, Hongli Li, Mary Beth Smrtic,
Min Yu and Jianping Zhou) for their help extracting
the metadata of the references and putting it in a form we can use.Finally we thank Shabnam
Tafreshi for help with the website.

We
also thank ACM and IEEE and in particular Mark Mandelbaum and Bernard Rous for
working with us to prepare the dataset.

Schedule and deadlines

Feb. 20th:Release
of datasetaround May
5th: Release of final
version of dataset.June 21st:
Original
deadline for submission JULY 1st:Final deadline
to submit materialsAugust 2nd:Acceptance
notification[[ results ]] August 23rd:
Camera ready materials dueOct.10-15th : InfoVis
and Vis conference in Austin,
Texas

At the conference

First place entries will
receive a prize and will present their work during the contest session at the
conference. The length of the oral presentation is still to be determined but
is likely to be similar to a short paper.

We will award
prizes for best entries in several categories. The judges will decide on the
exact categories based on the material received - possibilities include
"Best Overall", "Best Student Entry", and "Most
Original".

Rules

The contest is open to all except
those connected to the contest organizers and judges. If in doubt ask the
contest chairs.

You may use any
existing commercial product or research prototype, and of course you may
combine tools.

At least one
author of accepted submissions must
attend the Symposium.

"Partial answers" are acceptable but we encourage you to
attempt and address all tasks. In other words, if your tool or approach only
addresses part of the dataset or a subset of the tasks, you may participate in
the competition .

Submission InformationWhat to submit?

A 2-page PDF summary, a
recorded demonstration and a completed standard form (using our template) with
more information about the submission and the team.

The 2-page PDF summary
should provide an overview of the submission and the analysis process,
summarize the strengths and weaknesses of the approach, and provide at least
one example screen shot. The 2-page summary should be formatted in two-column SIGGRAPH format as described the InfoVis 2004 Call for Participation
. First and second place entries will have their 2-page summaries included
as-is in the printed poster compendium.

The recorded video
demonstration should focus on the interactive features of the submission and
the process of analyzing the data. Demonstrations should not exceed 10 minutes
in length with 5 minutes the recommended length. We ask for a recorded
demonstration because interactivity is an important component and is difficult
to evaluate only through a paper submission.
If you anticipate having difficulties generating a digital video, please
contact the contest chairs to arrange alternative submission methods.

Suggestions: Even a short video without sound is 100% more effective than no
video at all! One quick way to get a demo recorded on a PC is to use SnagIt from
TechSmith (you can try their free demo first) and see a few examples here).Please keep the file size reasonable
(e.g. 5 to 10 Mg max!)For Unix, others have recommended http://www.thedirks.org/v4l2/and http://heroinewarrior.com/index.php3,
but we have not tested them ourselves. If you cannot generate an avi or other digital format file, create a VHS, CD or DVD
and contact Georges Grinstein immediately.

How to submit?

All entry materials
(two-page summary, standard form and video) have to be submitted on the
web.You will first be
asked to register your entry and choose a password, which will allow you to
upload your materials right away, or to come back later and upload revisions
anytime until the July 1st deadline.SUBMISSION PAGE CLOSED

Judging

Submissions will be reviewed
by external judges with information visualization expertise. Criteria will
include: quality of the data analysis (what interesting insights you found in
the data), appropriateness of the visual representation for the data and the tasks,
usefulness and creativity of the interactivity, flexibility of the tool (how
generic is your approach), quality of the written case study (description of
the strengths AND weaknesses of the tool used), novelty (whether the approach
was off-the-shelf or well-known versus a new approach.)

Partial answers can be submitted.For example even if your tool can only deal with one of the tasks, we
encourage you to submit.Your
submission can very well be the one doing the best job at that particular task
and be recognized as such by the contest judges.For example you can submit an
entry only for task 1, or task 4.Of course submissions that answer all tasks have a better chance at the
overall 1st prize, but judges will have the possibility to create special
prizes for shining partial entries.